Idries Shah Quotes

My father used to tell me that stories offer the listener a chance to escape but, more importantly, he said, they provide people with a chance to maximize their minds. Suspend ordinary constraints, allow the imagination to be freed, and we are charged with the capability of heighetned thought.Learn to use your eyes as if they are your ears, he said, and you become connected with the ancient heritage of man, a dream world for the waking mind.

~ Tahir Shah

Fettered feet in the presence of friends is better than living in a garden with strangers.

~ Idries Shah

Any society which enjoins its members to adhere to both of these (politeness and truth) is a fraud.

~ Idries Shah

Imagination blocks you like a bolt on a door. Burn that bar. (Rumi)

~ Idries Shah

The existence of relative truth does not prove the non-existence of universal truth.

~ Idries Shah

Rumi speaks of people who rely upon the written word as sometimes being no more than donkeys laden with books.

~ Idries Shah

To drown in treacle is just as unpleasant as to drown in mud.People today are in danger of drowning in information; but because they have been taught information is useful, they are more willing to drown than they need be.If they could handle information, they would not have to drown at all.The lightning said to the oak tree: 'Stand aside, or take what is coming to you!

~ Idries Shah

We and all our existences are non-entities. Thou art the absolute being whose appearance is transitory.

~ Idries Shah

Sufis are not here to satisfy a demand. They exist to share what they have got. These two things are not always the same.

~ Idries Shah

Humility cannot be taught by propaganda, though slavery can. Shouting for humility is a form of arrogance. One of my most abiding recollections is of a priest at a religious occasion once roaring, in the most threatening way imaginable: ‘O our Lord God, we most humbly pray…!’Real humility is not always the same as apparent humility. Remember that fighting against self-conceit is still fighting: and that it will tend to suppress it temporarily. It does not cure anything.Remember, too, that humility itself does not bring an automatic reward: it is a means to an end. It enables a person to operate in a certain manner.

~ Idries Shah

If you will not reprove yourself,’ Saadi says, ‘you will not welcome reproof from another.

~ Idries Shah

He who sleeps on the Road will lose either his hat or his head.

~ Idries Shah

The worst of sages is a visitor of princes, the best of princes is a visitor of sages.

~ Idries Shah

Hariri says, in his Maqamat: ‘Safety is on the river’s BANK.

~ Idries Shah

Sufi Teachers are not, as you might hope, people who make you feel peace and harmony.

~ Idries Shah

Sufism is, in operation, pragmatic.

~ Idries Shah

The means through which people may perceive Truth have forms, Truth has no form.

~ Idries Shah